Wednesday, April 14, 2010

It's a Dog's Life

Well, it took me long enough to realize that I really needed to stitch a dog collage. Duh. And what better dog to stitch than a black lab. (Yeah, I know and agree that each and every type of dog is great, unique and loveable, but I had to start SOMEWHERE - grin.)

Here's my new LABRADOR COLLAGE:

When I thought about labradors and all the things they love, I realized I had to create some tennis balls and sticks in one of the collage boxes. Here's the geometric version I came up with:

And what lab doesn't enjoy a good chew stick and rawhide bone?

The red band in the top portion of the design is similar to a collar I had for my own black lab-mix, Libby. (You may prefer to change your accent color to royal blue, if your dog wears that color instead.)

And I originally planned to make a plaid box, in the red/blue/green/gold color combo.But a stitching friend of mine who looked at the piece in progress said,"Wait! You HAVE to have pawprints! It's not a doggie thing without pawprints." And she was right. I totally overlooked the obvious choice of pawprints. So I added the pawprints and simplified the underlying plaid (and even managed to slip in some beads.)

Black animals are the hardest to portray. All that BLACK, don't you know.... And I decided to create a rather generic labrador (a compromise between the stockier English types and the leggier American types) so if you have a taller lab, a more delicate lab, or a labrador-cross perhaps, you might want to make a few minor revisions. In any event, here's my version:

And to be fair to all labrador lovers everywhere, I decided to make separate graphs for black, yellow and chocolate labradors. And they all look equally fetching in a red/blue/green colorway, don't you agree?

So if you're a labrador fan, check out this new LABRADOR COLLAGE pattern on my website. Or as a dog trainer might say: "GO FETCH!!"....or better yet: "SIT! STITCH!!"

7 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I saw the dog collage in my nordic needle catalog I got yesterday! It is marked for ordering. I am thinking of doing a yellow in memory of our first lab Murphy and then will decide if I want to do a chocolate for our current lab Maddie - I just love all things lab. Thanks for the needlepoint!

OK, now you know you need to do a cat collage for those of us who are cat lovers! And with alternate colors as I'd want to depict my late Calico, late black cat, grey tabby and my current orange tabby. Love the dog collage though, very good idea and I love the way you portray the black as it is such a hard thing to get right.